


you burn through my mind, again and again, again, again… and again and again

by bettercrazythanboring



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: F/M, POV Second Person, impermanent death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-17
Updated: 2015-06-17
Packaged: 2018-04-04 21:31:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4153701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bettercrazythanboring/pseuds/bettercrazythanboring
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here’s the thing: “You will only ever truly love one person, and you will watch her die more times than you can count.” See, that? That’s bullshit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you burn through my mind, again and again, again, again… and again and again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brella](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/gifts).



> [Title.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwlgC-jSPTk) For the [ficathon](http://blevins.livejournal.com/32008.html?thread=731656#t731656).

You're a liar.

That's not news, of course—not to you, not to anyone who's ever been graced by your unholy presence. Or it shouldn't be, when  _you're_  the one doing the lying.

(Snaking and worming through holes in the truth is something you take pride in—twisting and bending reality until your falsehoods are fact and everything else is merely philosophical debate—but the most potent lies, you've found, are the ones you don't recognize to be such, the ones you tell yourself every night like bedtime stories. They sneak up on you, clenching their claws into your mind and biding their time, until one day you rip yourself open and find that you're not who you thought you were, all those years. They laugh in your face as you stand in the bloodied remnants where your soul used to be, because you'd sold it for a dime to anyone who would take it, and now it's too late. To get it back, to fix it… to have any use for one.)

But this isn't about you.

It's about  _him_ —the other you.  _He's_  the liar this time, after all that spiel about wasting your life and the wiseness that he's supposedly gained with age; let it be known that you'd write a  _very_  sternly worded customer complaint letter if you knew where to send it to. You shouldn't be surprised, you suppose—he's you, and you're him, and both of you love your dramatic exaggerations, but you'd kind of hoped that maybe the geezer had been lying about the  _other_  stuff, that maybe you'd grow up and have the  _decency_  not to toy with  _this_.

Because here's the thing: "You will only ever truly love one person, and you will watch her die more times than you can count." See, that? That's bullshit. That's poetic tale-spinning, spewed by riddling trolls on bridges and ethereal ladies in lakes,  _specifically_  meant to make whatever the real answer is seem like a vague, gradual event that will bypass you without you even noticing.

Everyone who talks like that wants you to believe that their prophecies will happen like a blurry dream instead of something you have to  _live_  through—something you will taste on your singed tongue and try to scrub off your dusty skin, something that will crawl into the corners of your brain and play peek-a-boo when you are most vulnerable.

None of these people want to prepare  _anyone_  for what's coming. They get off on scaring you, and then they scurry behind their metaphors and purple exposition to lull you back into a false sense of security, just to watch you bleed again when they turn out to be right, when it turns out to be far worse than their quick tongues had advertised.

The truth is this: you only ever try to pretend you  _don't_  love one person, and  _she_  dies more times than  _she_  can count. You don't get to be a part of that.

You don't get to brush her sweaty hair out of her tear-streaked face as you rock her shaking form back and forth on the floor of a dank basement; you don't get to whisper things that you don't mean in her ear, things that you'll regret later because maybe, just maybe, you're lying to yourself instead of her this time; you don't get to soothe her wounds, to tell her that she'll be fine, that it'll all be fine because it's not the end and it never will be.

You never even get to  _save_  her—not once.

No, you get stuck stumbling upon her lifeless body in places it shouldn't be and soon never is again; you get stuck pulling daggers out of her intestines because you've learned the hard way that if you don't, she'll die all over again the minute she comes back; you get to see her in your dreams, blown up and hanged and drowned, and be afraid to ask her the next day whether she'd felt it too or if it's just your subconscious that seems to hate you both. (Some days, you can't decide which truth would be worse, so you never ask her, and you never find out.)

The few times you  _do_  watch her die—and you say "few" not because of infrequency but because it's such a small portion of all her deaths—it's quick and painful, and you don't have time to thoughtlessly blurt out any of the things you try not to think about. The thing is, as much as these moments frighten you (it's never been the end before, but what if this is the first time for everything), you keep them close, like shiny pearls wound on a string, each its own unforgettable memory, each a part of an infinite, ghastly whole.

That's where he, the other you, had been wrong: you do count them, each and every one. You count them like sheep before falling asleep, tick off your fingers in a mnemonic device during class, recite them to yourself every damn day like a fourth-grader trying to memorize all the states. In time it becomes a bizarrely comforting habit, and it's one you worry you'll never shed, because no matter how high the number gets (and, boy, does it), there are never too many deaths for you to remember—and no matter how gruesome they get, it's never enough to stop making you terrified of forgetting.

A Tuesday on a train track in a memory that didn't seem to be hers; a bloody blouse abandoned on the branch of a birch tree; a rooftop in the rain, with a masked man and no railing; you cycle through them all, again and again. A bear trap in the woods; a throat sliced clean open; a trip to the cave where something had once opened up inside both of you and this time swallowed her whole.

Sunlit streaks of lightning; black ink spilled over ancient scrolls; scars on her wrists, scars on her everything. (Nobody else seems to see them, not even her sometimes. Why is that, you wonder occasionally.)

A cracked mirror; a burst of electricity; one needle too many. Water; rope; a machete… And so it goes on.

The first time, five weeks after you'd seen yourself in a dream, she set fire to one of the greenhouses. You'd been out for a smoke in the dead of night, cursing the starlit skies and anyone claiming to live in them, when you saw the flames licking the glass walls from the inside. You'd seen her go in, and so you raced over without asking yourself why you wanted to, but it was too late. You'd walked into hell for her, and all you managed to pull out was a body with burnt hair, smeared soot, and no breath. (You tried to give her yours again and again; it really wasn't the fourth kiss you'd been expecting.)

You left her there, without even an idle thought of the riddles and prophecies that could've made you think twice. You spent a day and a half pretending you hadn't suddenly realized why this passing had left you emptier and hollower than anyone else's, and when she waltzed into History class in the morning, seven rings on her fingers and thick black eyeliner that was far too precise to have arisen from fire, you had almost done something unforgivably sappy, like hug her or reverently touch her cheek, or tell her you're glad she's not dead.

That's when you had become a believer, though, and a believer you would remain for the rest of your life. (What's the alternative? That she's gone, that you're seeing things, that it's all an elaborate parlor trick? You can't have that. You  _couldn't_.)

Again, though, flare for the dramatic. You suppose you can't fault the old man for his anymore, if even in a time like this it comes out as naturally as breathing, but you can't help it—"the rest of your life" just sounds sounds so much  _better_  than "a much, much shorter time than seeing yourself as a wrinkly grump had led you to expect".

Her trembling fingers brush a few stray strands of hair from your eyes. Her elbow is a cushion for your head, and she keeps holding you to her, rocking back and forth as though she cradled a newborn in her arms.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she chants through her tears, one hand pushing haphazardly against the red-drenched clothes of your abdomen.

It's no use. You can feel yourself fading. "'S okay," you say and flash one of your patented smirks, or at least half of it. "You had to. I would've done the same." The words sound muted in the clay of this abandoned basement; you have to force them out to be heard.

She eyes the wet knife next to her knee. "But I would've come back," Jade whispers before pressing her cold lips to your colder forehead.

"Now, now, let's not pretend my life really had any meaning, shall we?" you offer through half a cough. More blood pours out. "Not like I'd particularly have anything to live for anyway." You make a point of not looking at her, lest she get the wrong idea: that you're trying to make her feel better, that you're cracking wise because there's something you actually  _don't_  want to lose, that the nights you've spent together meant  _anything_ —

She bends to kiss you as she only has once before—slow and sweet and molten enough to make your chest feel like a prison for everything inside it. Your shaking slows under her touch as the minutes pass, and she draws away to whisper things you're quite certain she doesn't mean (can't mean, you don't want her to mean), so quietly, so chaotically that you might've been imagining half of them to begin with. And some time later still, you go motionless in her arms, grateful for it all.

You're a liar, see—and she knows it.


End file.
